Political Wisdom: On Independence Day

By

Mary Lu Carnevale

Jul 5, 2010 7:30 am ET

This holiday weekend, we are reminded that it’s not just hot dog eating contests, parades and fireworks that make the Fourth of July special. It’s a time to take stock of the direction the country is — or should be — going.

We need it to be fearless and obnoxious, out of a conviction that more speech, however much vulgarity and nonsense it creates, is always better than less speech. In America, this is a liberal spirit in the grandest sense of that word – but also a conservative one, since retaining that rebelliousness is tending to an ancient American tradition, from the Founders onward.

And so, if this is not too tea-partyish, some words of inspiration and admonition on today of all days:

“The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers… [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper,” — Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785.

Seventy years ago, British prime minister Winston Churchill delivered a speech before the House of Commons that masterfully rebuked the United States for sitting on the sidelines while Britain stood alone to defend freedom against totalitarianism. Churchill’s insights are worth recalling during our own season of war, when the historic ties between the two nations seem frayed and in doubt…